Howard Butler

YouTube video by Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum [CNG 2025] Data Gravity and Point Clouds – Howard Butler

Watch @howardbutler.com's #CNG2025 talk on cloud-optimized point clouds & how data chunking & #cloudnativegeo formats are reshaping how we process and interact with point clouds at scale
💡 "Can we do for point clouds [what COG did for rasters?]" Short answer: yes.
▶️ Watch now: youtu.be/4cB4mJjrkZU

Release 2.9.0 · PDAL/PDAL Changes of Note GDAL VSI Support @normanb added support for GDAL VSI in #4647. It is now possible to use VSI to control access to remote content. Any /vsi-prefixed file path will go through GDAL's...

I am pleased to announce the release of PDAL 2.9.0

github.com/PDAL/PDAL/re...

Goodies include GDAL VSI support by Norman Barker, FileSpec support by Thomas Swamy, filters.supervoxel by Bram Ton, SPZ read/write, `ogr` option for filtering, and greatly enhanced readers.tindex support by Isaac Bell.

A toblerity

A toblerity

yeah, usgs.entwine.io points to ~350tb of EPT. It's awesome for everything except when you need to federate the content in bulk.

I also wonder about Zarr in relation to TileDB, which seems to already have stuff like IceChunk built in and the user expectation is you write to a consistent open source API in any language instead of the Python-first Zarr ecosystem. We built silvimetric.com on TileDB for this reason.

My angst about Zarr is rooted in the fact that sufficiently large exploded-style data structures in the cloud are effectively immovable in bulk. We learned this lesson very harshly with EPT, as there are too many situations where you must federate content (ie your government is shutting things down)

The new GDAL 3.11 CLI has context-aware bash completion and spelling suggestions – options, formats, sub-commands, and more! No more fumbling for inconsistent names or orderings.

Join us at the GDAL CLI Deep Dive webinar on June 3rd at 1400 UTC to learn more. numfocus-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

About "osgeo.gdal": at one time the thought was osgeo could act as a Python namespace for participating packages. 'gdal' and 'osr' and 'ogr' were standalone scripts that were simply dropped into people's global installs. 'osgeo' brought them into a namespace that wasn't 'gdal.gdal'.

We're seeking funding to take @source.coop to the next level.

Page from John Snyder’s Projection notebook that dates from when he was 16 years old.

blogs.loc.gov/maps/2015/11...

Mostly a rant of frustration about the same pattern repeating.

Excellent references!

PostGIS/GEOS' buffer(0) is the start of your journey.

The GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes for December 19th, 2024 are now available at lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gd...

IMO, packaging is out of scope for a project like GDAL, although we have been supporting @conda-forge.org through PR activity because of its centrality to GDAL's continuous integration infrastructure.

As you know with ODM, windows/osx binaries attract a very specific, non-contributing audience 😉

There is money through the GDAL Maintenance Program thanks to our sponsors, and an RFC with an initial implementation has been written to provide a git-like CLI refactor gdal.org/en/latest/de...

It will be labeled experimental for at least a few major releases until it is clear there is uptake.

Dan Baston from the GDAL Maintenance Team posted the results of the first GDAL User Survey gdal.org/en/stable/co... The key takeaways were:

* Most people use GeoTIFF for rasters
* The CLI is very inconsistent and frustrating
* Two people claimed to be Frank Warmerdam

Panic attacks can be hilarious in retrospect?

I think it is important to acknowledge the GDAL User Survey's response population is likely heavily skewed toward open source geospatial power users, who are also likely to be QGIS users, which has its default format be GeoPackage.

Dan Baston from the GDAL project wrote up some interesting results of the first GDAL Users Survey which you can now read at gdal.org/en/stable/co...

Frank Warmerdam has already filled in his GDAL survey. Please help us by filling out yours.

2024 GDAL User Survey In 2024, for the first time ever, the GDAL project is soliciting feedback to help focus GDAL Sponsorship Program activities. The survey will provide guidance about priorities for the program's resourc...

The first ever GDAL Users Survey is now open for feedback at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... The survey is an attempt to provide structured guidance for the maintenance program to focus its efforts in the coming year. Please contribute and help us circulate it!